log

When I woke up last night it was a little windy outside, so I decided to unplug my MacBook Pro because the power tends to flicker here. When I picked up the MacBook I noticed that it was very warm, even though the lid was closed and it was in sleep mode. This morning I decided to dig into the “Why is my MacBook hot even though the lid is closed and it’s in sleep mode” question.

RxJava's Observable class has plenty of methods that can be used to transform the stream of emitted items to the kind of data that you need. Those methods are at the very core of RxJava and form a big part of it's attraction. But there are other methods, that do not change the stream of items in any way - I call those methods side effect methods.

As a brief note to self, when you need to debug a chain of RxJava Observable method calls, you can use the doOnNext method to log the current values or print them to STDOUT or STDERR with println. Here’s an example from RxJava For Android Developers, where the debug output is logged with the AndroidLog.d method:

I haven’t worked with JavaScript much in the last few years, and I just learned about this cool console.table output-logging technique, which I just saw on this website, which has several other good JavaScript debugging techniques.

Android FAQ: When is the Android Fragment onCreateOptionsMenu method called?

I was just working through a problem with an Android Menu and MenuItem, and added some debug code to the methods in my Android Fragment, and found that the onCreateOptionsMenu method is called after onStart. I didn’t put Log/debug code in every activity lifecycle method, but for the ones I did add logging code to, the specific order of the fragment method calls looked like this:

I needed to use Gnuplot a little bit over the last few days, mostly to create 2D line charts, and these are my brief notes on how to get started with Gnuplot. If you haven’t used it before, it’s a pretty amazing tool.